For over forty years a number of medical devices which contact the blood or blood product of living persons or animals have been developed, manufactured and used clinically. A partial list of such articles would include pacemakers, arterial grafts, heart valves, artificial hearts, heart pumps, hip protheses, heart lung machines, catheters and kidney dialysis equipment.
A major problem with such articles is that their working surfaces, (i.e., surfaces which contact blood or blood products), are foreign to those substances and tend to initiate, among other things, red blood cell destruction and coagulation to form clots (thrombogenesis).
Normal intact endothelium is nonthrombogenic due partly to the synthesis of heparan sulfate. Heparan sulfate tends to remain bound to the surface of endothelial cells accelerating the inactivation of thrombin, the enzyme responsible for the polymerization of fibrinogen to fibrin in clot formation, by anti thrombin III (ATIII). Heparan sulfate is a very powerful anticoagulant in the natural vasculature. Heparin is a strongly acidic glycosaminoglycan. It has a high content of N- and O- sulfonate groups and carboxylic groups. Heparin is structurally similar to heparan sulfate although it is more sulfated. The anticoagulant activity of heparin is directly dependant on its molecular size and electric charge. Thus, increasing the molecular weight and/or the amount of sulfonation will increase the anticoagulant activity. Therefore, it is felt that a highly sulfonated polymer surface may stimulate the inhibition of thrombin by ATIII. Consequently, it has been of great interest to physicians and the medical industry to devise blood-contacting polymeric surfaces that possess characteristics of heparan sulfate, specifically by coating surfaces with heparin. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,826,678 to Hoffman et al., biologically active molecules are chemically bonded to polymers and copolymers which previously have been radiation-grafted to inert polymeric substrates such as polyurethane and polyethylene. The grafted polymer is preferably a hydrophilic hydrogel e.g., hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) and may include heparin bonded to the hydrogel.